Overview

"The Dao De Jing (also called the Tao Te Ching) was written more than 2,500 years ago and is considered one of the most important books in world literature. Coming in at only 5,000 Chinese characters, its timeless wisdom has inspired millions of people around the world and serves as one of the cornerstones of the Taoist religion. It has been translated into English many, many times, but this new work by the best-selling writing team of Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang is much more than a translation. The authors have taken the unusual step of not just giving you the English translation, but also showing, word by word, how one gets from the original Chinese characters to the English version. Each of the 81 short chapters contains a beautiful English translation, followed by a word-by-word and line-by-line breakdown of the chapter, showing the original Chinese, the pinyin (phonetic spelling in English characters), a word-for-word literal translation into English, and occasional helpful notes to help the reader better understand the translation. The result is a book that can be read casually, or studied carefully, or anything in between. This new translation expresses the DDJ in simple language that anyone can access. In their Authors' Notes they say: ""This is a book for ordinary people, not scholars. Many DDJ translations have been created by scholars for other scholars, and while we have studied many of them and owe a debt of gratitude to those scholars, we feel that the DDJ's message is simple, practical and universal, and we want everyone to have the chance to benefit from it. We try to follow the guidance of Laozi in Chapter 70, who tells us, in his usual elliptical way: ""My words are very easy to understand, very easy to practice. In this world, they can't be understood, and can't be practiced."" It's impossible to do a 100% literal translation of the DDJ. Ordinary modern Chinese is quite different from Western languages, and the language used in this book is even more different. To start with, the original DDJ is extremely compact. Its verses have very few connecting words, forcing the reader to think deeply about the verse in order to tease out its underlying meaning or meanings. Some words can, depending on context, serve as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. Verbs in Chinese generally have no past, present or future tense, nouns have no gender (male/female), and no number (singular/plural). And to make things even more difficult, helpful little words like prepositions and pronouns are often missing entirely. As a result, translating literally from Chinese to English usually results in gibberish. Pepper and Wang have added just enough connecting words so that the sentence makes sense, while still expressing Laozi's thoughts as concisely as possible. They've also tried really hard to avoid the temptation to add things that weren't already there in order to make the sentence more readable. A Pocket Edition of this book is also available. The Pocket Edition contains only the English translation, not the original Chinese or the detailed translation notes. It's only 114 pages vs. 380 pages, and it's a smaller size (5""x8"" instead of 6""x9""), making it a better fit for the pants pocket."

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"""The essence of this great classic is in its flexible language and structure. No other book combines such brevity with profundity. Only a skilled translation can bring this out, and Pepper and Wang give us clear language and bilingual notes anyone can follow. If you want to begin your own journey on the Way, take this step-by-step approach through the Dao De Jing."" -- Deng Ming-Dao, author of 365 Tao, The Lunar Tao, and The Wisdom of the Tao ""Here's a translation that can speak to a whole generation of spiritual seekers."" - Jon Herman, Georgia State University, author of Taoism for Dummies. ""This translation of the Daodejing is both for people who want to read an excellent translation and for those who want to explore the Daodejing more deeply. The translation itself is very well done, so it is very good for people who just want to read the Daodejing in English. It also provides a do-it-yourself Daodejing - it gives a person all they need to make their own translation. It goes through each line of the Daodejing in great detail in a simple way so that it is possible for a person who doesn't read Chinese to understand the meaning of each character and how to use the character in the context of each line and chapter. Included are a translation; the Chinese text in a traditional version; line-by-line translation followed by Chinese characters, the line in pinyin, the meaning of each character, explanations of these meanings in easy to understand ways, and other possibilities of translation besides the translation that the authors decided on. My own experience shows an example of the value of this book. I can read a fair amount of Japanese characters, but I do not know Chinese. I can recognize many of the Chinese characters as being similar to a respective Japanese character. With the help of what is given in this book I can compare the meaning of the Chinese character with the meaning of the Japanese character. The result is that my understanding of each line of the Daodejing is greatly deepened. Now I am in the process of slowly working through the whole Daodejing and am appreciating it in a whole new way. This book provides a unique resource for my understanding of the Daodejing. I highly recommend it for a whole spectrum of people interested in the Daodejing, from those with no interest in Chinese to those who are fluent in Chinese. It is very useful for me!"" - Reggie Pawle, Ph.D. Cross-Cultural Psychology Service, Kyoto, Japan"

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